Resting Place

Gray, windswept and drizzly, the day presented a dour setting fitting for our visit to an isolated island cemetery where 5,000 people lie buried in a mass grave.

They are victims of ``Black '47,'' the worst year of the Irish potato blight in the 1840s. They tried to flee starvation in their homeland, only to die after their ship reached Quebec's quarantine station on Grosse Ile in the middle of the St. Lawrence River.

They were the lucky ones, having a final resting place. Many other refugees who died on the way were buried at sea. Weakened by malnourishment, they succumbed to ``ship's fever,'' as typhus was known, and cholera.

On ship after ship reaching Quebec in that awful year, sailors hoisted bodies by rope from below decks and swung them onto the beach, where they were piled like cordwood. They were buried in a field in wooden coffins stacked three deep.

Over the years, the coffins have rotted, leaving ruts in the field, which is marked by white wooden crosses.

Grosse Ile, about 30 miles east of Quebec City, is today a national park, commemorating the years from 1832 to 1937 that it served as a gateway to Canada, just as Ellis Island had for the United States.

Dedicated as the Irish Memorial National Historic Site, in tribute to the famine victims, Grosse Ile is reached by privately run ferries from May to October. Reservations should be made in advance. When we showed up on a weekday in September, we found the ferries weren't running until the next day.

In 1998, the government's Parks Canada dedicated a memorial to the people buried there, listing by year and name those who could be identified. The names are inscribed on a wall, similar to the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington. But in this case, the wall is made of clear plastic, and visitors have sight of the ``Irish Cemetery'' that lies beyond it.

``Here she is,'' said my wife, Jacquelyn Breen Renner, pointing to the name of her ancestor, Bridget Breen.

Records show Bridget, 23, had given birth to a baby boy at sea on May 3, 1847, aboard the ship Scotland, which sailed out of Cork on April 13. The young mother lingered feverishly for more than a month after giving birth. She succumbed onboard while under quarantine about a week after the ship arrived at Grosse Ile on June 8.

Some 90,000 mostly Irish immigrants -- three times the number as ever before -- passed through the port of Quebec in 1847. Sometimes as many as 40 overcrowded ships were lined up in the river for inspection.

The Scotland was the quintessential ``coffin'' ship. The 548-ton vessel crammed into her dark and fetid hold 564 passengers. Three out of 10 died -- 60 at sea, 34 aboard the vessel in quarantine and 72 in hospital quarantine.

Had the ship entered a U.S. port, she would have been allowed to carry only 220 passengers. The United States had in force since 1819 much more stringent maritime regulations that permitted only two passengers to be carried for every 5 tons registered.

As a consequence, many more Irish refugees in the sailing era went through Canada because it was cheaper. Also, because Canada was part of the United Kingdom, as was Ireland at the time, the Irish were easily admitted as subjects of the Crown, not foreign immigrants.

But passage to Canada also meant that many of the 44 million Americans who claim Irish ancestry cannot find records of their ancestors who crossed the border into the United States. Unlike ship manifests kept by the U.S. government, Canada has only a record of the dead.

Register Of Deceased Persons

That is how we found out about Bridget Breen. She was listed in ``A Register of Deceased Persons at Sea and on Grosse Ile in 1847'' by Andre Charbonneau and Doris Drolet-Dube. It was published in 1997 by Parks Canada.

Because we could not find any record of the family's arriving through New York or other American cities, we suspected they must have come through Canada. Had Bridget not died, there would have been no record at all of their passage.

Finding Bridget's final resting place was the culmination of a yearslong genealogical search for my wife's Irish forebears, who settled in Vermont.

The search began with ``Old Will'' Breen, as everyone in the family called him. A portrait of ``Old Will'' has been hanging above the fireplace in our living room for years. The kids have all grown up and moved out, but that picture remains burned in their memories.

``He was scary. I tried not to look at him but I felt his eyes on me,'' my daughter Andrea says.

I had never thought of the patriarch of the Breen clan as ``scary,'' but I guess an impressionable kid might find something fearful in his stern countenance. He has a strong face, framed by silver white hair, with a determined Promethean jaw. The picture is sepia-toned, but you just feel his piercing eyes must have been icy blue.